


Emotional Poison

by Jenwryn



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, Podfic Available, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-17
Updated: 2008-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-02 13:05:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time has passed since their return from Narnia. Peter went to the war, and now he has come home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emotional Poison

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think it's technically AU, although it's a while since I've read the books. All I know is that the Pevensies returned to our world in 1940 and, while they did return to Narnia, they were ultimately in our world through until 1949. We know do that Peter was tutored by Kirke, but we also know that he was seventeen by 1944.
> 
> There is a podfic version [here](http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/emotional-poison), at Jinjurly's Archive.

He watches from the settee as she folds her legs, and then refolds them, the black line drawn up the back of her calves shifting oddly with the movement. Her hair is dark in the flickering dullness of the one globe, hanging bare from the corner of the room. She’s taken up smoking again, though God only knows where she gets the money for it from, and the white-blue-colourless haze blears around her, an almost sticky-smelling halo of foggishness. She’s looking everywhere but at his face. For ten whole minutes, half an hour ago, she had simply gazed at his boots. He’d noticed that they were scuffed and unpolished, which had made him realise just how unkempt he was. He’d been overseas. He’d been in Normandy. He’d forgotten about the little things like that and he’d forgotten about presentation. She never did. She was always so carefully created, like a doll or a Chinese painting. She hadn’t been like that, in that other life they’d led. He can remember her, barefoot in damp grass, a stray yellow petal stuck to her temple. Sometimes he thinks he’s the only one who does remember. Sometimes it’s like a hole eating him up from the inside. But then, other times, he sees her out of the corner of his eye and he think that she remembers too; he sees it through the shield of smoke.

The sight of it almost kills him.

He doesn’t speak. He does not trust himself with words.

She says his name but it is barely her voice and when he looks up at her and finally sees those eyes of hers directly upon him, he knows that he must save her. “Susan―” he whispers, hisses, murmurs, moans, too much noise for two small syllables. And then somehow he’s crossed the room and is kneeling at her feet. She inhales a moan of her own and closes her eyes, opens them, reaches out one hand and places the side of it against his face, uses her other hand to stub out her cigarette. Her touch is cold and he wants to grab her slender fingers and rub them warm between his own, but her hand is moving against his skin now, stroking upwards into his hair, and he cannot move to halt _that._

“Come away with me,” he murmurs, broken. “Come away where no-one knows who we are.”

She lets out a sob that might be a laugh and now both her hands are in his hair, mussing up the blondeness, and her nails dig into his scalp as she pulls him up to her, pulls him, pulls him to her lips and kisses him like an open-mouthed bite.

The shredded world collapses.

He remains kneeled between her knees and her kisses devour him. All the time in between, all this false life that has passed between then and now, between now and their last life, it all vanishes and they could be _there _again and him a King and her his Queen and her skin bare against his.

The flat is small and grimy, and the single bed squeaks in vile protest as he lays her out beneath him, her hands unbuttoning his shirt, his fingers encompassing the paleness of her breasts that he has already released from her blouse. His mouth covers a nipple, breathing it in, inhaling the familiar taste of her, muddled with, but not lost beneath, the flavours of smoke and talcum powder and cheap perfume. She moans as his knee spreads her thighs, raises her skirt, and nudges against her. She helps him undress her, and he runs his hands along the bare lengths of her legs with their drawn-on nylons, making a note to ask her how she’s actually dealing with money, then deciding that this is neither the time nor the place to be actually caring. His fingers slide upwards amongst her shadows, caressing and cajoling until her hips press hungrily against his hands, her head slung back against the pillow, and the overcoat he tossed there on his arrival. Her hands reach blindly for him, struggling unseeingly with his belt and trousers, releasing him, begging him, demanding him, as he lets her guide him. He groans at the motion of her walls already spasming convulsively against him as he thrusts with increasing speed, hand clasped over her mouth now as she groans his name, loudly, deeply, dimly aware as he is of the paper thin walls and the fact that the iron bedhead is already drumming against them with rhythmic thuds, but he can’t care about that too because – _god _– all he can know is her and she is everything.

Afterwards he breathes in the smoke that wraps around her, accepting the cigarette she passes him, their heads both against his overcoat now, and small dustings of white ash falling amongst the dampened blankets as she leans over him, breasts swaying, brown-pink nipples brushing against him, and tosses the lighter on the table. Then she leans back, curls her free hand against his chest, and inhales deeply.  
“Is that what you’ve been doing, then?” she asks softly, slender fingers, warm now, playing absently amongst the fine blonde hair of his chest. “All this time? The tutoring with Kirke? The war?”

He turns his head and nuzzles her hair, which smells of yellow laundry-soap. “Doing?” he repeats back at her, as though he doesn’t know what she means.

She breathes out a mouthful of blue smoke tendrils. She closes her eyes, lashes so dark against skin so pale, and walks her fingers down to his bellybutton. “Running away from me,” she says.

He answers that with a kiss against her left eyelid, and a kiss against her right.

They lie in silence; listen to the sound of each other breathing, of a woman beating something in a metal bowl in the place next door, of children nattering outside, and pigeons complaining raucously on the windowsill. They listen to the sound of the street below and the city beyond. They listen to the grittily turning cogs of every day life.

Then Susan says, “I’ve heard that Scotland is nice enough. Nobody knows us there…”

She is emotional poison, is Susan, the angel of his damnation.

But she’s also his salvation.


End file.
